Autobiography Essay Best Practices

Autobiography Essay Best Practices Putting a life into words rescues it from confusion even when the words declare the omnipresence of confusion, since the art of declaring implies dominance., Patricia Meyer Spacks At some point in your education or your career you will be required to make a presentation about yourself or to write an autobiography as an assignment. It is not the story of a life; it is the recreation or the discovery of one. You may wonder… Why writing an autobiography is important? The answers are simple: to leave a message to future generations to pass on your heritage to put closure to a period or episode to process experiences to preserve family history to share what and who you are and to get high grade on the task assigned. The history of autobiography Etymologically the word autobiography is a compound of the Greek terms  autos  (self),  bios  (life), and  graphe  (writing). At its simplest, then, autobiography can be defined as self-life-writing. Autobiographies have been written since A.D. 400 when an early Christian leader, Saint Augustine, wrote his first one. The autobiography definition by Oxford dictionary is as following: “an account of a persons life written by that person.” How to write an autobiography? Writing your autobiography is very interesting and challenging task. Your life is not boring to other people as it is different from the one that other people experience. Can you imagine that living on the beach in the bungalow, enjoying the sunsets every day, swimming with whales and dolphins may sound crazy to the person who had never seen it? What if you were growing up among the sky-scrapers, surrounded by concrete and machines but have never experienced living in a jungle? Would you like to hear more on this from the person who did that? Would you enjoy his story and to try it once? I bet you would! This is what autobiographies are about. Some of them might be fictional, of course, but some of them are true. If you are asked to write an autobiography or you are very inspired by someone’s example, take a pen and a paper and start writing. The first thing to do is to select the topic. So how do you determine your theme? Youve probably heard the saying that diversity is the spice of life. Your job is to find out what makes your family or your experience  spicy  and build a narrative around that. In other words, the real meat of autobiography lies in specific episodes and details that no one but the author could relate, and in the author’s ability to combine those episodes into an interesting story. You can share your family background. Your first step in researching your own autobiography is to gather some background story. Some things to consider: What is interesting about the region where you were born? How does your family history relate to the history of that region? Did your family come to that region for a reason? Or you can tell about your childhood. You may not have had the most interesting childhood in the world; but then again, you may have had an experience that was more interesting the most. The idea is to highlight the best parts when you can. On the other hand, if you grew up in the country you should consider that many people who grew up in the suburbs or inner city have never eaten food straight from a garden, never camped in their backyards, never fed chickens on a working farm, never watched their parents canning food, and never been to a county fair or a small town festival. Another thing you can do in your autobiography is to express your culture. Your culture may differ from the one someone might have. You might visit a new country and marvel at the way in which people in that country talk, think or act. Small things like how people dress, how towns and cities are designed, how people communicate with each other â€"all of this can be quite interesting to the ones who have never been exposed to these different examples of culture every day. Choose the topic which can reflect the traditions on holidays you observe, the customs you practice, the foods you eat, the clothes you wear, the special phrases you use, the language you speak, and the rituals you practice. Crafting your autobiography Of course, there is specific structure for autobiography. Your autobiography should contain the basic framework that any essay should have, like an introductory paragraph with a thesis statement, a body containing several paragraphs, and a conclusion. But the main trick is to make your life story an interesting as you can. Thus, here are the techniques (rather tones of a voice) you might use in your writing. Narrative, in which you give a linear account of events without much reference to underlying emotions or moods. Descriptive writing, which is appropriate when you want to paint a picture of something for your reader, either because of its beauty, its ugliness or simply because its very different from what that reader may know. And the last one is Emotional writing, when you have strong feelings about your topic and want to evoke some emotional response in your reader. No mater of the style of writing you use, it is also a good practice to search for some autobiography examples in the internet. Those examples can bring some ideas on your writing, compare different writing styles and help you to build up your own unique one. Writing autobiography is not an essay and a fast task, it will obviously take time. You will have to conduct a research on your own life when you begin your writing. Try to make your autobiography fascinating to the readers. If you doubt that your life has something worth sharing or it doesn’t have interesting details to present to the audience don’t worry. Your story is  much  more interesting than you probably realize. In case you’re still lacking the inspiration to write your autobiography essay, you can always come to the writing experts and order professional writers help.